A Fascinating and Unique Collaboration

[Voronwë the Faithful]

INTRODUCTION

In the preface of Arda Reconstructed I state that that book “documents a fascinating and unique collaboration that reaches beyond the grave.” (Kane 13.) However, The Silmarillion is only one element of the collaboration between J.R.R. Tolkien, on the one hand, and his youngest son Christopher, on the other, a collaboration that could be said to have spanned the past eight decades, at least. I wanted to take the opportunity to document how that collaboration has played out over such a long period of time. None of this is new information, though I am not aware of it all being gathered together in one place. While most of this is probably familiar to most hardcore Tolkien scholars, it might not be as well known to everyone here, and I thought some might find it of some interest.

The collaboration began with Christopher being – along with his siblings – the original audience for whom Tolkien originally wrote the beloved fairy story, The Hobbit. Even at that early age he started demonstrating the qualities that would make him such a valuable asset to his father for so long. In the ensuing years, as Christopher entered the early years of manhood with the backdrop of the world at war, he became the principal sounding board and confidant of his father over the course of the creation of Tolkien’s unquestioned masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Christopher then went on to parallel his father’s professional success in academia, which left him in a unique position to renew his contribution to his father’s legacy after his father’s death. It is those contributions for which Christopher deserves the most praise, for it is because of those efforts that his father’s true genius is so fully known and appreciated. One can certainly critique individual decisions that Christopher has made, but the value of his overall contributions simply cannot be questioned.

Yet Christopher’s contributions are often underappreciated, and sometimes even mocked. I believe that is largely because people misunderstand the role he has played, and that is largely due to the fact that that role has no similar models with which to be compared; it truly is unique. The one common comparison (and one from which much of the mocking is derived) is with Frank Herbert’s son, Brian, who together with Kevin J. Anderson, has continued Herbert’s Dune series with a fair degree of commercial success, and almost no artistic integrity. However, this comparison is not at all apt. Unlike Brian Herbert, Christopher has never attempted to duplicate or continue his father’s creative output; a wise choice because in both cases the son simply is not the father. Instead, Christopher has labored mightily to both present as much of his father’s creative (and scholarly) writings as possible, while at the same time explaining and adding context to that presentation. A better – though still not perfect – comparison is one used by Jason Fisher in his chapter in the retrospective The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On called “From Mythopoeia to Mythography: Tolkien, Lönnrot, and Jerome” in which he compares Christopher’s work to that of Elias Lönnrot, who compiled the Finnish Kalavela. (Fisher 111-138.) The difference, of course, is that Lönnrot was compiling the writings of a multitude of different authors, whereas Christopher was working with the output of only one writer. But that reflects more on the extraordinary nature of J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation than on the value and scope of Christopher’s Tolkien own efforts.

Christopher was (and continues to be) in a unique position to interpret and transmit both his father’s scholarly and his imaginative writings, which is seen perhaps most profoundly in the most recent (and perhaps last) posthumous collaboration. From early on, Christopher and his father shared a close bond. In his biography of Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter notes that Tolkien wrote in his diary about Christopher that he “had grown into ‘a nervy irritable, cross-grained, self-tormenting, cheeky person. Yet there is something intensely lovable about him, to me at any rate, from the very similarity between us.’” (Carpenter 172.) It was in large part that similarity between them that made Christopher such a valuable asset to his father, both during his lifetime and after his death. Christopher was particularly sympathetic to the types of things that his father was writing about, as well as in a position to understand the sources (both personal and professional) that influenced his father. And he had the patience, persistence and scholarly training to present the material in a coherent manner, and in context. In a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin in 1946, Tolkien himself called Christopher his “chief critic and collaborator.” (Letters 118.) Little did he know how true that statement would prove to be.


THE HOBBIT AND THE LORD OF THE RINGS

It is well-known that Tolkien originally wrote The Hobbit as a story to read to his children. Even then, at a very early age, Christopher displayed the attention to detail (and perspicacity) that made him such a valuable asset. His brother John and sister Priscilla noted “Christopher was always much concerned with the consistency of the story” (Family Album 58; see also Glyer 152). Christopher himself describes in the foreword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Hobbit interrupting his father’s reading of the story to correct him, saying “Last time you said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a golden tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin’s hood was silver.” His father was “much annoyed” at this but immediately went to his desk to make a note (see Glyer 152). This attention to detail would become increasingly important in Christopher’s work with his father’s material over time.

As Christopher got older, his father quickly put that quality to good use. In 1938, while confined to bed due to a heart condition at the age of 13, he was set by his father to the task of finding typographical errors in the text of The Hobbit at two-pence a time (Letters, 28 ). By the time Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings, it is clear that he considered Christopher one of his two most important readers, along with C.S. Lewis, as shown by his March 4, 1938, letter to Stanley Unwin in which he wrote “The sequel to The Hobbit has now progressed as far as the end of the third chapter. But stories tend to get out of hand, and this has taken an unpremeditated turn. Mr Lewis and my youngest boy are reading it in bits as a serial. I hesitate to bother your son, though I should value his criticisms. At any rate if he would like to read it in serial form he can. My Christopher and Mr Lewis approve it enough to say that they think it is better than the Hobbit; but Rayner need not agree!” (Letters 34.)

Indeed, Tolkien suggests early on in the writing of The Lord of the Rings that Christopher was probably more in accord with his own tastes than his other readers, Mr. Lewis and young Rayner Unwin. Writing in a letter to Stanley Unwin to thank Rayner for his “excellent criticism” which “agrees strikingly with Mr Lewis’” he noted that “[t]he trouble is that ‘hobbit talk’ amuses me privately (and to a certain degree also my boy Christopher) more than adventures.” (Letters 36.) A strong indication of how important Tolkien considered Christopher’s opinion is seen in a 1944 letter to Christopher in which Tolkien wrote “I am not really satisfied with the surname Gamgee and shd. Change it to Goodchild if I thought you would let me.” (Letters 83.) But one gets an even stronger impression from reading the full series of letters written during the two year period from October 1943 through October 1945, during which Christopher was serving in the Air Force and his father was sending him drafts of The Lord of the Rings as it was being written. From Letter 50 through Letter 104, all but three of the 55 letters included are to Christopher (see Letters 63-117). Of course this is an edited and abridged collection (and, of course, Christopher himself assisted Humphrey Carpenter in the selection and editing of the collection), but the impression left could not be clearer (and could not have been manufactured by selective editing). It is not just the simple fact that Tolkien felt driven to share what he was writing with his youngest son despite (or perhaps because of) the thousands of miles that separated them, and the vicissitudes of a world engulfed in war. No one who reads these letters could fail to see how close the two were, how unusually willing and able Tolkien was to share his thoughts and feelings with his youngest son, and what a deep bond of love there was between them.

The volumes of The History of Middle-earth relating to the creation of The Lord of the Rings provide only a small amount of additional insight into Christopher’s role in the writing of The Lord of the Rings beyond what can be seen in the Letters (besides discussion of his work on the maps, which I will discuss further below). Christopher notes that his father wrote in the margin of an early draft of the chapter “A Short Cut to Mushrooms” “’Christopher queries – why was not hat invisible if Bingo’s clothes were?’” and added that he was “greatly delighted” with the old story of Frodo’s predecessor, Bingo, turning the tables on Farmer Maggot and he theorizes that this may explain why his father continued to retain it “after it had already become apparent that it introduced serious difficulties.” (RotS, 297 n. 13.) Similarly, on the manuscript of an old draft of the following chapter, Tolkien wrote “Christopher wants Odo kept” (referring to one of the original Hobbit characters that accompanied Bingo). (RotS, 299.) These are minor details in the grand scheme of the writing of the epic, but I think they illustrate both how interested in the project Christopher was, and (more importantly) how important Christopher’s opinion was to his father.

What is just as interesting as how few such references Christopher describes in The History of Middle-earth volumes related to The Lord of the Rings. I suspect that there were more such occasions (though perhaps not documented on the manuscripts by Tolkien) that Christopher fails to mention, given Tolkien’s repeated statements that Christopher was the main audience that he was writing for (see Letters 91, 94, 103, 104, 112-113, 118). This suggests that Christopher – who has long been famously reclusive – is uncomfortable with the spotlight, and with discussing himself, which perhaps also helps explain why he speaks so little in the later volumes of The History of Middle-earth about his own decision-making process in creating the final published version of The Silmarillion, to my and other’s regret.

Christopher’s most concrete role in the creation of The Lord of the Rings, of course, was in creating the map. As Diana Glyer says, “The verisimilitude of The Lord of the Rings has its roots not only in J.R.R. Tolkien’s thoroughness but also in the skill and clarity of Chiristopher Tolkien’s maps. They allowed Tolkien to maintain a ‘meticulous care for distances,’ as well as an accurate assessment of travel routes and geography (Letters 177).” (Glyer 152.) Christopher made two maps of the Shire. (RotS 106.) In 1943, he “made an elaborate map in pencil and coloured chalks for The Lord of the Rings, and a similar map of the Shire” (RotS 200; see also Letters 86, 112). A map Christopher made in 1954 was published in the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings (RotS 200) and in April 1955 his father sent Rayner Unwin “Christopher’s beautiful re-drawing of the large scale draft-map I made of the area with which Vol. III is mainly concerned (Letters 210).

POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS

After the publication of The Lord of the Rings Christopher went on to establish his own academic career, which in many ways closely paralleled his father’s. As Tolkien stated he was, like his father, primarily a philologist. (Letters 247.) At Trinity College at Oxford “he studied Old English, Old Norse, Middle English, and the related languages and literatures that his father taught.” (Anderson 247.) He then “became a lecturer in English language and Old Norse at several Oxford colleges, acquiring a fellowship at New College in 1965. In this period he published some editions and studies of Norse sagas, including a translation with notes of The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise (1960). He and [fellow Inkling] Nevill Coghill co-edited three of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1958-1969).” (Glyer 243; see also Anderson 248-249.)

Meanwhile, his father turned back to working on the legends of the first two ages of Middle-earth that would become The Silmarillion. The natural question arises of why there is little or no record of Tolkien turning to Christopher for help in finalizing this, his lifetime work. We know that in 1965 Tolkien referred to Christopher as having read “all or a consider part” of Tolkien’s mythology of the First and Second Ages (see Letters 361, 451). Yet a year later it was an outsider with no previous connection to Tolkien’s work, Clyde Kilby, that Tolkien turned to for help in organizing this voluminous material (to no avail, although it did yield a charming little book by Kilby detailing his experience with Tolkien). Why this is is a matter of pure speculation. We do know that in a 1965 letter to his son Michael Tolkien expressed profound disappointment that his children had turned away from the Roman Catholic Church. (Letters 354.) In another, unpublished letter to Professor Przemyslaw Mroczkowski in1964 that was recently auctioned by Christie’s, he also expressed dismay at Christopher’s leaving the Church, and particularly about his divorce from his first wife (see http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_ ... 091f3318ed). However, this certainly would not constitute evidence of a major falling out between Tolkien and Christopher. I suspect that it is simply a question of Christopher establishing his own life, both professional and personal, and his father being reluctant to impose on that.

In any event, when it came time for Tolkien to designate a literary executor, there was no question who was the appropriate choice. While the language used in Tolkien’s will was likely written by his attorneys (and probably based on stock language), it is still telling that it grants such wide latitude to Christopher. Although I have not seen a copy, it is widely reported that Tolkien’s will grants to Christopher “full access to [Tolkien’s published works] in order that he may act as my Literary Executor with full power to publish, edit, alter, rewrite, or complete any work of mine which may be unpublished at the time of my death or to destroy the whole or any part or parts of any such unpublished works as he in his absolute discretion may think fit and subject thereto'.” (See, e.g., http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2009/12/tolkiens-will.html.)

There is no question that this confidence was well-placed. As Rayner Unwin has said, “... no other author has ever had the advantage of a literary executor with the sympathy, the scholarship, and the humility to devote half a lifetime to the task of unobtrusively giving shape to his own father's creativity. In effect one man's imaginative genius has had the benefit of two lifetime's work.” (Unwin 6.) From virtually the moment of his father’s death, all the way through last year, Christopher has brought the same qualities that had him correcting his father on the details of Bilbo’s front door and Thorin’s tassel as a small child when his father was reading the unpublished Hobbit to him and his brothers to bring his father’s work to public.

It is telling that the very first project that Christopher completed after his father died was not editing one of his father’s works of fiction, but rather, one of his scholarly works. In 1975 he edited and published his father’s translations of the important medieval poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, which his father had failed to publish despite pleas from Rayner Unwin a decade earlier (see Kilby 18-19). That year he also edited and revised for publication his father’s “Guide to Names in The Lord of the Rings” which was published in The Tolkien Compass, edited by Jared Lobdell.

Meanwhile, he was busily engaged on the overwhelming task of trying to publish The Silmarillion. When Clyde Kilby spent the summer of 1966 assisting Tolkien in the attempt to put this material in some sort of usable order, he came away with the sense that the book would never be published. (Kilby 20) Guy Kay, who ended up assisting Christopher in the process, describes the many boxes of material that Christopher had already busily been sorting through when Kay arrived in France where Christopher was working in 1975. (Noad 3-4) Christopher himself described the huge collection of material that his father left on the Elder Days. (Brief Account.) According to Kay, Christopher originally intended to take a more scholarly approach and it was Kay who first suggested constructing a text from different sources. (Noad 4.) Neither Christopher nor Kay have revealed much more about their respective roles in the process, but Christopher did acknowledge “there’s a great deal of my own personal literary judgment in the book. (Cater 94.) There is, of course, room for different opinions about some of those literary judgments (those who have read Arda Reconstructed know that I have some quibbles with some of them), but I do not think that anyone can question what a huge achievement it was to actually bring the book to publication in 1977 (just four years after Tolkien’s death), given the daunting state that the manuscripts were in.

Two years later, Christopher published a book of his father’s artwork, Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien, with notes and a foreword written by Christopher. Then, in 1980, he published Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. This book, with fragments of stories and essays covering all three ages of Middle-earth, followed the more scholarly approach that he apparently had originally intended for The Silmarillion, with extensive notes and commentary by Christopher. This would set the standard for his greatest work to come. However, before he set out to achieve that work, he turned back to his father’s academic work, editing and publishing in 1983 a volume of his father’s most important scholarly essays, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays.

That same year saw the publication of The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, the first volume of The History of Middle-earth. Over the next 12 years, he published a total of 12 volumes of this remarkable series, unique in literary history. I do not think it is possible to overstate just how impressive this accomplishment is. It literally could not have been achieved by anyone else. As Douglas Anderson wrote, “[t]he deciphering of his father’s hasty and near illegible drafts alone required an unusual patience and determination, as well as an insight and intuition that could have come with an intimate familiarity with his father’s handwriting. Many of these manuscripts were written first in pencil and then in ink atop the penciled draft. … One can only marvel at the ability and skill required to decipher these texts (Anderson 248). Equally impressive is Christopher incisive commentary, which fully demonstrates his attention to detail, his own scholarly training and his love and respect for the material. Of course, opinions about the volumes of The History of Middle-earth vary widely. David Bratman famously tells of pointing out to another Tolkien scholarly that The Shaping of Middle-earth (the fourth volume of the series) improved greatly on the second reading, only to get the response “You read it twice?” (Bratman 71.) Personally, I find it all wildly interesting, and my major complaint about the series is the same as Tolkien’s own biggest complaint about The Lord of the Rings; despite the many thousands of pages that make of the series, I think it is too short, and would happily have digested more.

One criticism of Christopher that I have heard is that despite the several self-criticisms that he makes about the published Silmarillion in the course of the History of Middle-earth series, he never published a true revised edition of that book to correct what he perceived in hindsight (and after much more detailed study of the manuscripts) to do be errors. However, for the intrepid and determined reader, the revised edition exists within the covers of The History of Middle-earth, not just correcting those perceived errors, but accommodating a wide range of literary judgments. This is perhaps Christopher’s greatest gift to fans of his father’s work.

After the completion of the History of Middle-earth series, Christopher took a well-deserved break from publishing his father’s work (which, perhaps not coincidentally, coincided with the period that the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films were being developed, released, and digested). However, in 2006 came news of another major release to be forthcoming the following year. Of the four “great stories” that formed the skeleton of Tolkien’s first age mythology, the story of the children of Húrin was the one that Tolkien had most developed. Christopher therefore decided to edit and produce a stand-alone volume of this work, consisting of a single uninterrupted narrative, without notes or commentary. Some complained that virtually all of the content of The Children of Húrin had appeared elsewhere, either as part of the narrative of The Silmarillion or in the versions of Túrin’s story published in Unfinished Tales or in different volumes of The History of Middle-earth. Others had hoped for an even more inclusive version, containing, for instance, the story of wanderings of Húrin, or favorite details hinted at by Tolkien but not actually included in the narrative, such as the appearance of the dragon-helm of Hador at the battle of Tumhalad. However, Christopher was adamant about including only his father’s own writing, perhaps wishing to avoid repeating the circumstances of The Silmarillion, in which he was forced to insert his own literary judgments, sometimes to his future regret. In producing The Children of Húrin I think Christopher was thinking more of his father’s long-term legacy than of the immediate appreciation of latter-day fans. A stand-alone, uninterrupted narrative of one of his father’s most important (and darkest) stories is far more likely to stand the test of time than the volumes of The History of Middle-earth (which while fascinating appeal primarily to hardcore fans) or perhaps even The Silmarillion, with its episodic and remote nature.

Finally, last year saw the release of yet another major work, The Legend of Sigurd of Gúdrun. Here Christopher was able to present both his father’s fictional (though not a story of Middle-earth) with his scholarly work. If this book turns out to be the last book of his father’s that Christopher will publish, it is a worthy final act, because it amply shows all of the qualities that made Christopher such a valuable collaborator to his father for so long; his attention to detail; his own scholarly training and understanding of his father’s academic background; and most of all, his love for and fealty to his father and his father’s work. Christopher was perfectly capable of writing a cogent and acceptable introduction to the Elder Edda, the Norse mythology upon which the poems that form the meat of The Legend of Sigurd and Gúdrun are based. Instead, he mined the contents of the huge collection of material left behind in order to include the introduction in his father’s own words, in the form of lecture notes, adding his own commentary and notes only where they help to enlighten his father’s work. There is perhaps no better illustration of how he applied “the sympathy, the scholarship, and the humility to devote half a lifetime to the task of unobtrusively giving shape to his own father's creativity.”


Over the course of 80 years, from the time that he was a small child correcting details in his father’s narration of The Hobbit until his publication last year of the brilliantly-conceived and executed Legend of Sigurd of Gúdrun, Christopher has dedicated his life to promoting, presenting, and enhancing his father’s work. The skill, dedication, and sheer love that he has devoted to this endeavor is unparalleled in literary history. It truly has been unique and fascinating collaboration that has reached beyond the grave.

Works Cited:

Anderson, Douglas. "Christopher Tolkien: A Bibliography." In Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on “The History of Middle-earth,” edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Bratman, David. “The Literary Value of The History of Middle-earth.” In
Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on “The History of Middle-earth,” edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2000.

Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien. A biography. Paperback edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Fisher, Jason. “From Mythopoeia to Mythography: Tolkien, Lönnrot, and Jerome.” In The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On, edited by Allen Turner. Zurich: Walking Tree Press, 2007.

Flieger, Verlyn and Carl Hostetter, eds. Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on “The History of Middle-earth.” Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, First Paper Edition, 2008.

Kane, Douglas Charles. Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2009.

Kilby, Clyde S. Tolkien & The Silmarillion. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1976.

Noad, Charles E. “A Tower in Beleriand: A Talk by Guy Gavriel Kay.” Mythprint no. 107 (April 1989): 3–4, 6. Also published in Amon Hen no. 91 (May 1988).

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Paperback, 2000 (“Letters”).

____________, The Return of the Shadow. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988 ("RotS").

Turner, Allan, ed. The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On. Zurich: Walking Tree Press, 2007.

[WampusCat]

I enjoyed reading this excellent and thoughtful essay. Thanks for posting it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm glad someone did.

[Primula Baggins]

I missed this when you posted it.

It's a fascinating essay and appreciation of Christopher Tolkien's work, and almost all of it was new to me. You've greatly improved my understanding both of the importance of Christopher's role (from the very beginning!) and the difficulty of the work. Although this is a subject that's interested me for a long time and I've read other essays and snippets of this story (and all of the Letters, of course), I've never seen it presented so concisely or so well, or learned so much.

Are you planning to publish this elsewhere?

[axordil]

You know, I almost hate to say it, but as time has gone by I have viewed The Sil (and Unfinished Tales) more and more as a sort of "History of Middle Earth Vol. Zero." The cohesiveness just isn't there, because to a great extent it wasn't there in the decades of contradictory source material. That said, CJRT (and staff) did as good a job as might be humanly possible.

When I look at The Children of Húrin, on the other hand, I see a cohesive whole--and artistically a better work.

Great what-ifs of Tolkien-related history: what if, instead of cranking out the Sil, CJRT had been given/taken the time to put out that quality of work for the main stories contained therein, and plopped the other stuff into appendices? What we would have now? The Children of Húrin, sure, and probably Beren and Lúthien; what other stories are self-sufficient enough to have been released as their own entities?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

No, the material simply doesn't exist for a book-length version of Beren and Lúthien (or, sadly, The Fall of Gondolin). Túrin's story was the only one of the great tales that Tolkien wrote sufficient material on to produce a stand-alone book. Christopher truly would have fallen to the level of a Brian Herbert had he tried to fill in the details in the other great details enough to produce full books of them.

In any event, The Silmarillion had to come first. I certainly have my quibbles with some of what Christopher did in producing the published work (particularly in regards to what he left out), but most of its failings (if failings they are) should be attributed to the author.

[axordil]

I concur absolutely: JRRT changed his mind about the shape of the project one too many times. I'm all too familiar with the phenomenon.

I don't think there's enough material for a B & L the length of CoH, but something more novella in scope might be doable. Fall of Gondolin...there may just be too many plot strands there.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I wish that J.R.R.T. had completed the version of the Fall of Gondolin that he started in the early fifties, and then abandoned at Tuor's arrival at Gondolin. There is actually an unauthorized book out there that combines that combines that abandoned work with the detailed telling of the Fall of Gondolin in the Book of Lost Tales. I've never seen the book (I have no desire at all to support such unauthorized and illegal activities), but it would seem to me that the two parts would be too different in tone to work together at all.

[axordil]

You know, the slow-motion fall of Maeglin deserves a full treatment. A stranger among kinfolk, forced to watch as an outsider gets all he desired...and then the chance for revenge comes. I may have to steal that--although I'm pretty sure JRRT took some aspects of it from the Eddas. It's a very Nordic sort of tragedy, personal and dynastic rolled into one.

What about the Númenórean material?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

What about it?

[axordil]

Do you think there's enough cohesion to any of it to justify something like a novella?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

To the best of my knowledge, Christopher has published all of the major writings on Númenor. I do think that it would be interesting to gather them together in one volume, with a particular emphasis in showing the difference between the tales written from a Mannish point of view and an Elvish point of view. But it wouldn't be the kind of cohesive work that CoH is. I really think that over time that book will find its place as the third major "completed" work by Tolkien after LOTR and The Hobbit. And I think that Sigurd and Gudrun will also have lasting importance in its own way.

[axordil]

You may well be right on CoH. I still need to read "Sigurd and Gudrun." It will be interesting to see something fully-formed pre-Hobbit, even if it's not "all his" in the same way.